Brasyl

The shoutline on the cover proclaims, ‘Fking brilliant. I’m as jealous as all hell – it’s a beauty’, the quote attributed to SF Master Richard Morgan. And Brasyl is certainly a beauty to look at, wrapped in an iridescent stencil-cut cover with a colourful kaleidoscope of images beneath. But the flashes and explosions don’t end there. From line one we are thrown mercilessly into a heady, crazy country and drenched in its own rich cultural references, lifestyles, mores and indifferences. It’s hard to keep up. Brasyl dazzles, Brasyl titillates, Brasyl delights. Or rather, charms you with a succession of gewgaws and an episodic three-strand story that runs from the eighteenth century to the mid twenty-first.

In 1732, Jesuit priest Luis Quinn arrives in the Portuguese colony charged with seeking out a rogue priest who has ‘gone native’ in the best Colonel Kurtz/ Heart of Darkness traditions. In 2006, Marcelina Hoffman is an executive for surely the trashiest reality show TV station ever. And in 2033 Edson, small-time entrepreneur and spandex sex-toy/ superhero, gets involved with some heavy quantum computing dudes and falls for Fia who, due to her facility with the multiverse, appears marked for death. Because you see, all is not well in any of these time-periods. There is a shadowy organisation called the Order who are all about maintaining the status quo and stepping hard on anyone who approaches some understanding of the true nature of reality.

I’m in awe of the sheer volume of research and art that MacDonald has put into creating the world of Brasyl. If I didn’t know he grew up in Northern Ireland, I’d swear he spent his youth playing ‘futebol’ on the dusty streets of Cidade de Luz. The world he portrays is as disorientating as any alien landscape and I found myself initially enchanted by it’s idiosyncrasies, aided – to some extent – by a glossary (maddeningly incomplete) of Brazilian terms in the endmatter. But as the novel progressed, it started to get just a bit too much. I began to suffer, particularly in the second half, ‘shiny thing fatigue’ as each new chapter opened with some startling image, a trick that McDonald uses too often to remain effective. And then I began to look below the sparkle and the breakneck pace and consider the actual plot… ‘Fking brilliant’? Well, it’s a good story, but it didn’t blow my mind. And I did wonder at why the Order would charge a Marcelina doppelganger from another universe with the task of discrediting our universe’s Marcelina – and so tipping her off that some weird shit was going on – when it would have been more effective just to assassinate and replace her right off and infiltrate the Order’s main opposition. The story also suffered from not allowing us to see the Order’s side of things, resulting in their portrayal as one-dimensional black-hats, and I wonder if this was the reason for a jarring, but all too brief, point of view shift into the mind of Yanzon, Order Admonitory, in the last thirty page of the book. Look, if it’s a masterpiece, it’s a flawed one. But having said that, the voice is strong, the writing is accomplished, the story is entertaining – a good one for a rainy weekend when you want to be transported to the sun-drenched beaches of the copa.